Spectroscopy of silicon vacancy centers in Silicon Carbide

Color centers are point defects in crystals that can provide an optical interface to a long-lived spin state. They are one of the leading candidates for qubit platforms. The two most studied color centers are nitrogen vacancy center in diamond and silicon vacancy center in silicon carbide. In this work, we focus on experimentally studying the creation of silicon vacancy centers in silicon carbide. Due to its non-linear properties and wide bandgap, SiC enables the path for having integrated color center platforms and distributed quantum information processing. We will present the irradiation process performed on 500 um thick SiC samples using 3-8MeV electron beam while varying the electron fluence to create silicon vacancy defects. In addition, the spectroscopy setup used to detect these defects through photoluminescence will be shown. Photoluminescence is used to characterize vacancy defects by using resonant laser excitation where electrons are excited from ground state to excited state and relaxes back to the ground state emitting a photon at 861nm. The density of point defects is quantified by the intensity of the photoluminescence spectra. The goal of this project is to study and tune the electron beam parameters to create controlled and localized defects.